maybe its time we consider going back to software (oss) based networking gear. it will be much slower than hardware based ones but we can't verify hardware designs like we can software ones.

That software has to run on hardware and if you can't trust the hardware you are screwed anyway, it's like trusting your software (oss) encryption when there's a hardware keylogger installed. Send the right magic numbers and the hardware could start doing anything it wants like mirroring traffic, dumping memory, whatever the attacker needs to completely compromise the box. The only advantage would be that it could run on more generic hardware that you hopefully could buy from a more trusted supplier.

Snowden is a giant monkey wrench in that; He's done more to harm America than pretty much anyone since the turn of the century save perhaps Osama Bin Laden, if we want to count out dollars on it. I hope they find him and make him suffer for a long time, slowly. He claims to be a patriot, but he's done most damage than our biggest enemies.

In today's multi/transnational corporate world the USA does not exist. The famous Authur Jensen speech from 1976 comes to mind. There is nobody that's going to protect us from this anywhere in the world. Anybody who tries will be 'liberated'. And the biggest part of the problem is that people keep on blaming policy and politicians for this, and nobody will look in the mirror and admit that they voted for it, To them I say, *you asked for it, thankyouverymuch.* The ball is in our court.

When your government puts its own institutional interests above those the people from which it derives its democratic legitimacy, it's no longer acting democratically. So, technically, once the US began operating imperially, back in the 19th century, the slow withering rot of oligarchy began to emerge as the driving farce behind the facade of electoral chaos.

Take the case of Teddy Roosevelt who believed that the US naval superiority should be used offensively to increase domestic political power by use of force or the ease by which Truman chose to drop not one but two weapons of mass destruction on the Japanese. These actions were neither expressions of democracy of altruism. They were imperial. Not that we should overlook the covert actions of the Dulles brothers when they used the Dept of State and CIA to prosecute the interest of US corporate business around world in the 50s.

The players have changed but the song remains the same, and now that the world is largely developed and includes 7 billion people who tend to get in the way, either legally or by their mere presence, there's nothing left to do but degrade the wealth of those who share the same nationality. So get ready for the 21st Century. It's going to be a bumpy ride if you still believe in the fairy tale of Democracy for all or self determination for anyone.

or the ease by which Truman chose to drop not one but two weapons of mass destruction on the Japanese.

Truman was trying to end the war between Japan and the U.S. before it could become a long, drawn out ground war costing millions more lives. AFAIK, the U.S. only had enough material for the 2 bombs (after testing), which of course was not made public. Japan did not immediately surrender after the first A-Bomb attack, and that's when the 2nd bomb was used, and only then did Japan surrender. Thank God that Japan did not know that Truman was bluffing his poker hand, or the war could have gone on far longer.

AFAIK, the U.S. only had enough material for the 2 bombs (after testing), which of course was not made public.

Uh, not true. They were pumping out new bombs on a production line, and the third bomb would have been ready to go soon after the second was dropped; Truman vetoed any further use. If I remember correctly, they were up to about one bomb a month by that point, and accelerating.

AFAIK, the U.S. only had enough material for the 2 bombs (after testing), which of course was not made public.

Uh, not true. They were pumping out new bombs on a production line, and the third bomb would have been ready to go soon after the second was dropped; Truman vetoed any further use. If I remember correctly, they were up to about one bomb a month by that point, and accelerating.

Correct, but the U.S. had used up it's inventory...

" Charles Sweeney published his memoirs as War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission (Avon, 1997). During the party following the successful Hiroshima drop, he recalled that Paul Tibbets took him aside and told him that he was to command the second atomic mission, with Kokura as the primary and Nagasaki as the secondary target. Timing was important, Tibbets said: "It was vital that [the Japanese] believed we had an unlimited supply

The notion that the United States had but two atomic bombs to use against Japan at the end of WWII is false. By August 1945, both the plutonium bomb complex at Handford, Washington and the uranium bomb works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee were in full production mode. According to Captain Don Albury, who flew in both atomic missions, a third atomic bomb was already in the pipeline---I believe at Wendover, Utah---soon after Nagasaki. He told me personally in July 2002 that Kokura was the target of the third atomic

I've personally seen the declassified war documents written by the leaders of the DoD at the time.

Japan was on the verge of surrender before we bombed them. The USA knew this. It was a conditional surrender to USSR. The USA demanded an unconditional surrender to the USA, for strategic and practical reasons. The cold war was already ramping up. The USA President and War Secretary decided to drop the bombs to force this surrender.

You can read about all of the above in these docs. Copies of them are located at

Truman was trying to end the war between Japan and the U.S. before it could become a long, drawn out ground war costing millions more lives. AFAIK, the U.S. only had enough material for the 2 bombs (after testing), which of course was not made public. Japan did not immediately surrender after the first A-Bomb attack, and that's when the 2nd bomb was used, and only then did Japan surrender. Thank God that Japan did not know that Truman was bluffing his poker hand, or the war could have gone on far longer.

Oh yes, please continue to to repeat that mass-murder-justifying state propaganda. It does wonders for our society's ability to think clearly about moral issues.

There's a strong argument that the real reason for Japan's surrender was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which happened at the same time. You'll note that the Allies did a lot of damage to Japanese cities with conventional weapons without forcing surrender. The firebombing of Tokyo caused similar damage to the bombs. The bombs however were a convenient excuse to avoid losing face, because unlike the Manchuria campaign they couldn't be blamed on Japanese military incompetance.

And so one thinks that these back doors only exist in U.S. products? Maybe Cisco, et.al. would be more "open" to their protocols? Maybe more profit could be made by approaching solutions were simplicity is illuminated?

> sad but true. as a US citizen, I am sorry for how badly we have botched the world's trust.

Don't worry, you never have been trusted as a nation. Individual Americans, sure, I am likely to trust them more than my countrymen, but collectively all political entities behave the same. Our interests first.

Fortunately most secure internet protocols are designed on the assumption that you can only trust the end points, not anything in-between them. As such replacing the end-point routers with non-US hardware/software will improve security.

Just goes to show what I asked a few weeks ago. Back in Oct I posted a comment that this may lead to a IT revolution of sorts because of all of this.

No surprise that when I commented about it before I was labeled 1:Redundant.

Think ahead people. If I were a competitor from outside the USA I'd be asking Snowden to release more details. Heck, I if I were a CEO of one of them I might be writing him a "thank you" check. The worse the NSA spying appears to be(or even that looks plausible to do with financial resources) the more people will want to avoid US companies that might be in bed with the government.

At this point, it doesn't really matter "how much" worse it gets. Everyone's already figured they can source hardware from outside the USA. What would be an interesting twist is if decades later we find out that all these people started buying from China or some other country and those do actually have backdoors while the US companies actually didn't.

What trustworthy country do you want to buy them from? China? Russia? One of the major US allies?

sigh

Just give me the Cisco one.:(

Tell you what: get a RasberryPi and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter (USB2.0 - max rate - 480Mbps - I thing it's enough for a home user).
There, for under $70, you have the base for your very own router, under you control. VPN capable, no less.

Had you any business acumen, you'd realize that your short-sighted vision will bite you in the bum long-term.
"Yes, we suck, but the other guys suck worse"
Eventually, someone will come along/transform to provide a better solution and eat your lunch.

Stop measuring the economic contribution of an event solely in terms of tax revenue. Cisco pays salaries, purchases goods and services from subcontractors, pays dividends, etc. All contributions to the economy before the gov't takes its cut.

"Cisco’s techniques cut the effective tax rate on its reported international income to about 5 percent since 2008 by moving profits from roughly $20 billion in annual global sales through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda"

So if a corporation actually loses money in a year, they shouldn't pay any tax?

Why not tax-to-revenue?

I have to have a place to live, stuff to eat, transportation, and all sorts of other little stuff. Cost of living. Yet I'm taxed on my income. All of it.

Corporations have buildings, employee wages, recurring costs. It's all just cost of doing business. And as a business expense, they aren't taxed on it.

If a corporation has a major breakthrough and makes a billion bucks, they can finally sell off some of that crap investment stock (which was really a sweetheart deal to a friend) and report zero profit. Meanwhile, if I work hard and get a bonus, or a second job, or win the lotto, it's taxed at the top rate, and if I make extra payments on the house, or credit card debt, or pay off some medical bills, that's all out of my wallet.

It's not that these are tax cheats, it's that the game has all of it's rules written for, and by, the big corporations. And since they're international, they avoid as much of the game as possible by moving profits overseas.

Quoting Bob Marley, economy is the bloodline of any society. It's where the buck stops. I hope that our "patriotic"(nationalist) Orwellian ways can play a second fiddle to our economy. If not, we are paving our path to our own demise.

Quoting Bob Marley, economy is the bloodline of any society. It's where the buck stops. I hope that our "patriotic"(nationalist) Orwellian ways can play a second fiddle to our economy. If not, we are paving our path to our own demise.

As long as it doesn't backfire in the public opinion, a lot of Americans might be sympathetic to exposing the extensive spying on others but when it starts hurting their own wallet is that anger going to be directed at Snowden or the NSA? I mean in the whole "Snowden - hero or traitor?" debate tanking the US economy is probably not a plus. Personally I think you'll get a lot of first-order reaction and the second-order reaction "But should we really have been spying in the first place?" will be much weaker,

That's to be expected. Security of data is critically important to all businesses, even the American ones who are also affected by the NSA scandals. I would expect politicians to be in an uproar and call for the dismantling of the NSA and for all their secret projects to be disclosed and security holes patched up so America can once again be trusted.

Lol, who am i kidding. I expect people to be silenced, jailed, tortured and publicly humiliated if they dare speak the truth again, and for the NSA's budget

If the American security infrastructure is going to turn American corporations into de-facto arms of the intelligence process, then nobody has any choice but to not trust them.

Anything involved in the security of the internet that's been tainted by being complicit with the NSA et al can't be trusted. So Cisco is going to feel the pinch.

Anything in 'the cloud' ran by a US company is subject to PATRIOT Act demands. So Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon... they're all going to feel the pinch. And Google's hosted solutions for email is also something you can't trust.

When the NSA undermines security for their own ends, then anything they've had a hand in can't be trusted.

So the end result is most governments and companies in other countries more or less have to look at any US player as not trustworthy, or actively hostile to your goals.

As long as you keep acting like your security trumps the sovereignty of everyone else... well, the only answer is to say "OK, fuck you" and cut you out of the picture entirely.

All of your big corporations are more or less presumed to be lying (because they can't admit to participating in this), complicit with collecting data to send back to Big Brother, and violating local privacy and data access laws.

And since 'Murica has been railing about how the Chinese are infiltrating their stuff (while doing the same thing), and complaining about countries which restrict a free internet... they've lost a position of having the moral high ground. The US is doing everything they accuse other countries of doing, only they're apparently doing it on a massive scale.

So, yes, this should have an impact on the US economy. And you can choose to stay the course and see it keep happening, or you can fix the problem. And so far, we've seen no evidence whatsoever there's any contrition or accepting that what they did was going to piss off everyone else.

But when all of those orders start getting cancelled, and new ones stop coming, don't stand around wailing about how unfair it is that people have decided they can't trust you and don't want your stuff.

But in a country which is actively ignoring its own Constitution and freedoms, I'm not expecting any meaningful introspection on behalf of the US. I'm expecting more bluster, claims about how everyone else is doing it, and continuing with the status quo.

When SOPA was a looming thing, I was in the market to move from shared hosting to a VPS, and so I made it a point to chose a VPS that was in another country.

Sadly, I chose the Netherlands, who are NSA collaborators. I'm just waiting for a specific piece of software to be released, and I'm out of there and on to a new server in a new country - I'm thinking Switzerland right now. Iceland is too expensive.

You could make the argument that this is overblown, but you cannot deny that it is true at least to some significant degree. The ironic part is how the U.S. government has been warning us about the coming cyber-apocalypse, and it turns out that they have done more to stoke those flames than anybody else.

We have found that we cannot trust the networks of ISPs anymore: there can be an NSA tap anywhere. A good and practical move would be to start using more and more robust end-to-end encryption. Things like SSL are possibly out of question as NSA has corrupted the root certs.

Listen up. Any news that casts an unfavourable light on the economy is a risk to your economic security. It must therefore be kept strictly secret. Anyone found spreading this unpatriotic propaganda is going to find themselves in a re-education camp.

These leaks have cost America the trust of an entire generation. In the last few months I deleted my gmail, linkedin, facebook, twitter, ebay and amazon accounts, and when my cellphone dies I won't buy another. If US companies deny their customers the basic human right that is dignity through privacy then it will be to their extreme financial loss. Personally I want no part of what these services have to offer because they do not respect me as a individual. I don't trust the hardware, the software, the services, the network, the companies or the government. And google can stick glass up their ass.

> So the particular statement referring to the NSA making identity theft easier is flat out BULLSHIT.

How so? I thought it is pretty much fact. They introduced some weak encryption, and most of all they introduced weak random number generators, which means any key generated using it should be considered compromised. If the NSA can break it, the hackers will learn how to break it, too, especially if there is money behind it.

I would, but look what happened to the last brave American who tried that. I don't want to have to seek asylum in Russia and ask some crime ridden South American country to take me in, nor watch my back every minute for the U.S. agents trying to kidnap or kill me. The President talked big about protecting whistle blowers before this happened, but then all of that was quietly removed from his website Everyone of us that actually has the proof knows better than show it to you.

dunno about that, but I don't get why bother with nsa created holes when the legislation allows the holder of information needed for such id theft to sell it and some have been selling them(credit check companies).

and about cert authorities with usa operations being coerced to co-operate? fucking no shit sherlock! that's not even news, that's just a direct consequence of the powers the agencies have.

A bit hard to prove a case of it but not too hard to show the possability. Google around for the documented cases in Greece and (IIRC Italy) where organized crime used U.S. mandated back doors into telephone switches to spy on their government.

The only acceptable opinion of government is suspicion and loathing. When people like government it becomes this icky thing where the figurehead turns into a god and that figurehead's actions are revered by those who aren't getting killed or robbed by him/her.

I think you're just failing to understand the scope of what they've done. The NSA planted people in standards bodies to deliberately weaken those standards. Not only do we have eye whiteness's from those standards committees that have complained about this for years, but we've got leaked documents from the NSA bragging about doing it. One of their primary goals seems to have been to dissuade broadening the use of encryption in general. By making the standards complicated, hard to understand, a lot of people just gave up and didn't implement them. In other cases they tried to block standards from using encryption by default. All of this leads to a less secure network. Without a doubt those actions of made crime and identity theft much easier. Can we find some guy and say that his identity was stolen because of the NSA? No... but what we can say is that without the NSA's interference, there would be more, and better encryption... and more and better encryption would have definitely reduced the numbers of identity thefts in the world.

From one perspective some of us do care - they do make stuff that works reasonably well.

But my suspicion is that there's more to this than just abandoning Cisco. In many cases it's a lot cheaper to set up a router based on a PC and Linux, which probably is what happens in "emerging markets".

As for the NSA - they could probably do a lot better for the economy if they did put their effort into tracking down and nuking scammers, spammers and other internet pests - and their karma would be better. And they better use the CIA and others to really "take care" of those problems.

Emerging markets can use hand-me-down SOHO equipment in their houses, classrooms and hotels, but those machines connect to something bigger, and throwing Vyatta on a used PC doesn't compare to a 6500 for your campus or 9000 for your new ISP.

Well, yes and no, but reportedly 98.9% no [businessinsider.com] in the case of at least one huge deal that fell through.

SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half and there was little you could do about it.

The main thing they've got left to compete with is the trust in their brand, the idea that they're a safe bet and no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco. They're in trouble even without all the NSA publicity, but if their own government is damaging their established brand, it doesn't exactly help their situation.

SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half.....shop....

Hmmm..... SDN... I cannot comment on the "cut value in half" but theyseem to have a toe in the waters. Of interest big Cisco hardware hasfew if any honest competition. One of the keys issues is provisions for"legal" wiretaps. Legal taps in contrast to the NSA vacuum it all up problematicprocesses.

Router based on PCs were there since last century, it wouldn't change projections beause they were always there.
But putting an equipment that you can't trust in the critical point of your network where you must have the maximum trust (either because Cisco want to cooperate, or is forced to, secret laws are nukes in the trust domain) is not a great idea.

From one perspective some of us do care - they do make stuff that works reasonably well.

But my suspicion is that there's more to this than just abandoning Cisco. In many cases it's a lot cheaper to set up a router based on a PC and Linux, which probably is what happens in "emerging markets".

As for the NSA - they could probably do a lot better for the economy if they did put their effort into tracking down and nuking scammers, spammers and other internet pests - and their karma would be better. And they better use the CIA and others to really "take care" of those problems.

Yup. NSA knows where all the child porn distributors are, what they are using to do it, and who the people are.

To paraphrase McCarthy, "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the government as being members of child trafficking rings and who nevertheless are still working and operating in the United States."

If you've got actual evidence to back up your claim, set the wheels in motion - but don't get trigger-happy. As much as I'm disgusted with government, we do not want or need another red scare.

The problem with using "a PC and Linux" as a router is even if you are picky about the hardware its still gonna suck several times the amount of power a piece of dedicated hardware would and in most emerging markets power is anything but cheap. Now sure if the router is gonna be doing other jobs, such as the AMD Bobcat I set up that was a combo router/media server? it might make sense but you go with the traditional "just use this no longer useful P4 PC" route you'll be blowing through the juice.

As for the NSA...who cares about the hardware? Any company that gives 2 shits about privacy is gonna avoid the USA like an STD and the NSA also put the brakes on the whole "just use the cloud!" bullshit as we now know anything you put into a USA based cloud becomes the NSA's to snoop as they like. I'm sure the amount of money all this business avoiding the USA is just insane but sadly getting an exact dollar figure would be next to impossible.

A decent company would have outed the requests (if allowed, or ideally even if not). The problem is, I would guess that they're promised government contracts, etc, in exchange for their 'patriotism'. Global companies should think globally and not let local greed endanger their business.

every vendor who rises above a certain level of market share is going to be 'asked' to install backdoors in their networking and infrastructure gear.

I can't say how I know this, but I know this. I'm pretty sure I know this...;)

its not just cisco. its all networking gear that the US gov would want to buy and operate.

Well, supposing I don't just take your word for that... I'll still be basically convinced by now that your statement is true. I don't think your assertion surprises many at this point. The question is, will these economic bottom-line implications succeed where public outrage so far failed to materialize, and curb this outrageous level of policing the nation/world?

That would be so bitter sweet. And an entirely typical way for America to do the right thing for the wrong reasons...

Well, nobody knows how much of a choice they have in the matter. If the NSA come rolling in with a National Security Letter, comply and keep quiet it's rather hard to refuse. It's not like they'd just make a corporate fine for leaking it, they'd be going after individuals to put them in prison. Are you ready to do a Snowden and screw your whole life for the sake of not complying with a government order of questionable constitutionality? If the government wants to put you over a barrel, they can.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.

That is extremely unlikely. What is more plausible, however, is:

1. They continue to lose the confidence of international customers.

2. Those customers seek alternative arrangements that they consider more trustworthy, possibly ad-hoc ones at first.

3. Over time, a new generation of more structured alternatives begins to develop to supply the new market demand, offering similar services and products to the big name US brands.

Some of these may be direct commercial competitors, but that's not really the concern for the current market leaders, because the barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete head-on is huge. Probably the greater risk is collaborative movements, whether Open Source tools or simply a degree of standardisation and compatibility between smaller vendors that means you can build (for example) a heterogenous network using a pool of specialist vendors and have a good chance of it working.

This is potentially toxic to broad US vendors such as Cisco in the networking space or the big cloud services companies who ideally want you to outsource almost your entire IT infrastructure to them alone. Which brings us on to...

4. Even in the US, long-time and lucrative customers start second-guessing whether they still need US IT Brand X, and those brands start losing serious money to both the foreign movements and, over time, also to new competitors in the US who are riding the open/collaboration wave to get a disruptive foothold in the market.

I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.

For a lot of people and a lot of different reasons, it would be cause for celebration if these markets opened up and weren't dominated by a few giants any more. That's the heart of the problem for the giants.

The related problem for the US government is that new entrants in the markets won't necessary be based in, or even operate in, the United States. Aside from any potential security concerns that might give them, it's going to hit the US tax man right in the spreadsheet.

It's cause for celebration for another reason: when it becomes clear that US corporations are going to be seriously hurt by the NSA's activities, it provides some serious incentive to lobby against NSA surveillance.

Uhm..., no? Yes? Maybe? What is your point?
Personally, I despise Cisco for their heavy handed business practices. They lost my business a long time ago, but from the "what's good for the U.S. economy, they do still count. So it sucks, hard, to see our government's misguided policies affect them, not to mention just about every other U.S. tech company with an international market.

Dude, it's agreed that slashvertizements are in bad taste...like asking a girl for sex when you go to pick her up for a date (i.e. it's super rude), but having said as much (seriously editors, do something about this), everything this blurb is talking about was predicted. NSA goes on privacy knifing binge, other Powers decide not to trust the US with their secrets, the businesses of the US cry out. Predicted, known, and they still didn't care. And now they want our trust, again, so they can betray it, again

We don't like what the US does. So we boycott this company because they may be working with the NSA...However... the NSA can work with many "foreign" companies as well, As in today global economy the difference between a foreign company and a US company, is the location of the CEO's most used office.Plant an operative, in the manufacturing area, when he installs the code of the firmware to flash, he puts in a slightly different version.

Exactly, that's the part these self-professed "patriots" don't get. Ideology and nationalism doesn't put food on the table.

Actually, it would.

If everyone in the US would stop buying foreign goods or sending money oversees, the US can sustain itself. There is more than enough farmland, more than enough industrial capacity to produce everything needed and the world's most innovative area (silicon valley) is in the US.

So while I'm not at all one of those "the US is the best" folks, it is certainly true that the US will survive should the world decide to hate it.